Digital Scholarship Team wins National Award

The University's Data Forensic Lab has been recognised for its innovative use of ICT by VALA.

The prestigious VALA Award, made biennially, is presented to the Australian library or information service judged to have made the most innovative use of information technology during the previous two years.  The VALA Award recognises outstanding and innovative use of ICT to improve service to customers.

The development of this service and lab is a first nationally for an academic library and a response to a growing demand to access and extract valuable research data and files from now obsolete systems and media. The Data service and forensics lab offers a range of services for examining, analyzing, recovering, re-using and preserving data stored in digital media in a forensically sound manner. The Data Forensics Lab can process a variety of modern and legacy computer storage media using state of the art purpose built hardware and software.

For the first time in its history the award was jointly presented to two recipients. The University of Melbourne and the National Library of Australia.